Bodies of Water/Bodies at Work

Joliet’s exploration of the Great Lakes and Mississippi had, this map tells us, been blessed by happy luck. He has escaped all danger and crossed forty-two rapids and seen wonders along the way; he describes seeing the beautiful banks of the great river, its fruit trees, and the watermelons taken for refreshment in lands too hot to know ice. But 15 minutes away from his return home to Montreal, in sight of French settlements, his canoe flipped and he lost all his papers to the waters. All that remained to him was his life, he notes, and fortunately also his memory: this map was made by memory shortly after the accident.

This map looks remarkable different from that of Joliet, but it stems from the same journey, and was originally drawn by the Jesuit Jacques Marquette. Here Marquette reduces the represented journey to the essential line of the Mississippi, so that the purpose and narrative of the journey is clearer.

Hennepin’s waters were not always as peaceful as those shown in the frontispiece. He was the first European to write about Niagara Falls, describing European waterfalls as “meagre samples” in comparison; this image, made from Hennepin’s drawing, is the first published plate showing them, and for decades after images of the Falls were based on this. Notice the little figure at bottom left, with his hands over his ears; Hennepin wrote that the water was louder than thunder, and that its bellowing could be heard for fifteen leagues around. The verb “mugir,” to bellow, is striking since Hennepin also insisted on the water’s capacity to destroy any animal that happened to graze nearby. His description of the Falls strongly recalls European accounts of monsters.

This is one of a series of plates by Theodore de Bry stemming from the drawings made by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, the official artist of the briefly-lived French Protestant colony in Florida (1564-5). These images depict the practices of the local Timucua people; in contrast to many later depictions of American waters, here De Bry shows indigenous people using the water for pleasurable pursuits. The text describes the scene as a family picnic, praising the Timucua as “excellent swimmers”; yet despite the pleasurable setting, the man carries a quiver of arrows on his head, just in case. It is unusual in European depictions of this period to see beneath the water; here, what lies beneath is the tantalizing nudity of the Timucua.

The Baron de Lahontan had served in the French military in the upper Mississippi valley, and his accounts, mingling fact and fiction, were key to the establishment of the figure of the “noble savage.” Here he gives an “ample description” of the bark canoe of the Iroquois, with such specifications about design and construction that the reader is almost invited to make one at home. Lahontan describes the smallest canoes as “death traps,” but he shows how the different positions taken by the skilled canoeists – here shown standing – enable them to navigate in very different conditions.

This fragile bundle is a French-Huron (Wyandot) dictionary from the late seventeenth century, probably compiled by the Jesuit Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot. The dictionary’s headwords are all in French, apart from the opening term: atotrahzi, to get into a canoe on the shore. The dictionary drips with specialized vocabularies for water and watercraft, suggesting something of the complex watery world the Jesuits were trying to understand; at the end it gives clusters of related terms. Here we see the entry for canot (canoe), with many subheadings: bark canoe, stitching the canoe, the canoe is taking on water, navigating the canoe, escaping from the canoe, and so on.

Lahontan, like Le Beau and many other French writers, was not only interested in human techniques for handling water. He also describes the skill and artistry of beavers as navigators and managers of water, noting that he knows many men with not one hundredth of their intelligence. The story of the political life of beavers and their Republics, was often told in eighteenth-century texts, but Lahontan and others also depicted the battle between human and animal intelligence in extraordinary images like this one of a beaver pond, showing beavers in freedom (pulling trees across the water) and in defeat (caught in nets and traps).

Joutel’s text tells the story of the last journey of La Salle down the Mississippi, and of the “tragic story” of his death following a mutiny, using the language of early modern religious fiction. Joutel’s story has a very definite agenda in showing La Salle as “the Hero of this account,” but his work is also filled with engaging details of natural history and ethnographic observation. Joutel was particularly keen to explain new technical vocabulary to his French readers, and here he details the new term canot, canoe, in the margins of his text: “a little boat made of wood, of bark, or of skin.” Elsewhere he takes pains to explain the concept of portage, a process mysterious to Europeans for its confusion of the distinction between land and water.

The Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau’s extraordinary book on the customs of the American Indians imagines history proceeding in developmental stages; for Lafitau, the American cultures he observed in his time in the Saint Lawrence valley were akin to that of the European ancients, and their cultures could be considered together without regard for history or geography. Lafitau’s comparative method places American canoes alongside the vessels used in Europe before the “high perfection” of more recent shipbuilding techniques. The improbable mash-up of this image shows both Abenaki and Outaouac boats and a place of portage. Lafitau might have seen Americans as “behind” the Europeans, but a sneaking admiration creeps in as he describes the movements of their canoes on water. For Lafitau the bark canoe, that “fragile machine,” was “the artistic masterpiece” of the sauvages.

The Blathwayt Atlas is a composite atlas, consisting of 48 manuscript maps created between 1629-1683, used by the office of Lords for the Committee for Trade and Plantations. The atlas is an extraordinary compendium of imperial knowledge and record-keeping and a testament to the many different kinds of information and activities associated with rivers. Not only were they places of commerce and maritime travel—and necessitated precise information about depths and coastlines, indicated here on the panel of Surinam by the bathymetric measurements of rivers’ depth—but also information about what happened at particular bends, such as indicated here in the notations “good trading here for bread and drinck”—and “good fishing”.

This map is the work of Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, mathematician, astronomer, and scientist, who in 1754 was appointed Royal Land-Surveyor and Hydraulic and Mining Engineer of New Spain. It is part of a legal dispute over water, but more than that it shows all of the works of irrigation and water management in the area of Chalco, to the south of Mexico City. All of the haciendas and pueblos de indios (indigenous towns) were in the path of the water coming down from the Sierra Nevada in the north. Competition for water and land among privately owned haciendas and the communal lands of the indigenous towns increased over time. The water in the south is Lake Chalco.

This classic early description of Virginia is perhaps best known for its intricate depiction of the geography of the Chesapeake bay and its tributaries and inhabitants. Among the maps’ many features, the York and the James Rivers are described not only in terms of their navigable depths (and the types of boats that can ply these waters) but also the peoples living along them and their war-making capacity. The James River is particularly densely annotated, and the observations make clear that it is a river not just for navigation but for making homes and finding sustenance. The little bay at point Q has remarkable “bays and creeks” that “make that place very pleasant to inhabit” and tributaries so rich that “we lived 10 weeks upon oisters.” Rivers and bodies of waters on many maps did more than just provide navigational aids: they provided their own microcosm of reflections the nature of the people, lives, and work to be lived alongside them.  Along with the selection from the Blathwayt atlas, also included in this exhibit, the map includes careful labeling of the types of business and work that are conducted along its shores. Rivers, in this portrayal, are more than just navigable bodies of water; they are also the meeting point of people and the sites of trade and business.

Written in the rich South American colonial city of Lima, the “Labyrinth of Terrestrial and Naval Commerce” offers another intricate glimpse of the world of work associated with naval commerce. In the third book of this famous treatise by the Spanish-born jurist, he discusses in minute detail the component parts of maritime trade. From a section on the ocean (mar), to the ships (naves), fleets (flotas), customs (aduana), damages (daños), shipwreck (naufragio), insurance (seguro) and more, Hevia Bolaños offers a glimpse of the ways in which maritime commerce drew in people and sectors of society far from the rivers and seas along which boats sailed.  Indeed, the pairing of “terrestrial” and “naval” commerce in the work’s title itself points to the contemporary understanding of these two worlds as linked.

This map, sent by Cortés along with his letters to Charles V and published in Nuremberg in 1524, is the first pictographic representation of the city seen in Europe. The north is on the right. Visible in the east (the bottom of the image) is part of an indigenous dike created to prevent flooding during pre-Hispanic times, but it also served to separate fresh water from salty water. The former came from rivers and lakes in the South (Chalco and Xochimilco), while the brackish water came from Texcoco, the main lake. Because of the indigenous representational style of the dike, art historians believe the map Cortés sent is a copy of an indigenous one. Nevertheless, many other elements such as the houses and the main square are decidedly non-indigenous. The extensive manipulation of the area (dikes, canals, bridges, and streets built on the water) is clear, as is perhaps the beauty of the city in the eyes of the Spanish, who soon after seeing it and describing it for the first time for a European audience, razed it.

This map of Mexico City includes a schematic representation of Lake Texcoco and its divisions. The city is still surrounded completely by water in spite of the more than one century of drainage works initiated in 1607. This map was accompanied by a separate sheet describing it and including a lettered key of important locations.

Notice the contrast between the city delineated so well and the unrealistic location and form of the lakes. The structures of the aqueducts coming from Chapultepec are visible in the north (the west in the real city). Some remnants of the aqueduct still exist in Mexico City today.

This is a map derived from the Mapa de Sigüenza y Góngora Sigüenza map, a map originally made by polymath Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora in 1692 when the city suffered from severe flooding. It shows with more clarity the location of the city in relation to the mountains and the enormous lake. When compared to it, and especially if one takes into account the many rivers carefully represented, Mexico City appears small, vulnerable. The map, laid out in a West-East direction, also gives us another view of the enormous importance of the Sierra Nevada (upper-right corner) very prominent in the Chalco map of 1754.

As we can also see here, everything (lakes, rivers, mountain ranges) was interconnected. Notice as well the extensive hydraulic works, and especially around Lake Zumpango, in the middle left, the drainage system built to rid the city and its environs of excess water. As the map shows, drained water was directed to Río Tula (left bottom corner) and from there to Tampico.